Where Ampere and the Altra definitely is beating AMD in is TCO, or total cost of ownership. Taking the flagship models as comparison points – the Q80-33 costs only $4050 which generally matching the performance of AMD’s EPYC 7742 which still comes in at $6950, essentially 42% cheaper. Of course, performance/$ will vary depending on workloads, but the Altra’s performance is so good that I don’t think it really changes the narrative of that large a cost difference. We’re really on basing this on both companies’ MSRP prices and we know for a fact many customers will be paying less than that for volume purchases and relying on discounts, but that can also apply to Ampere and the Altra.
One will note I didn’t make any mention of Intel yet - Intel’s current Xeon offering simply isn’t competitive in any way or form at this moment in time. Cascade Lake is twice as slow and half as efficient – so unless Intel is giving away the chips at a fraction of a price, they really make no sense. Ice Lake-SP is around the corner, but I don’t expect it to manage to bridge the performance or efficiency gap. Ampere and AMD here have free reign on the server market share – with Ampere having to cross the hurdle to convince customers to switch over from x86 to Arm.
Ampere is already shipping Altra systems to customers, with Oracle’s cloud business being the first big notable win for the company – signifying already very positive reactions in the market.
What we need to keep in mind though, is that today’s comparisons were against AMD’s EPYC 7742 which was launched almost 15 months ago. Rome’s successor, Milan, is already shipping to customers and has already started hitting the channel, and we expect to hear more about the Zen3-based EPYC chips in the coming weeks. I’m not expecting major leaps, but a 20% performance bump is pretty much a safe bet to make – it would beat the Q80-33 in more workloads and shift the balance a bit – but Ampere’s aggressive pricing would still be something for AMD to worry about.
What really excites me, is the potential of future Altra designs. Ampere has already announced that Altra-Max “Mystique” will be coming in 2021 – essentially a 128-core version of the same Neoverse-N1 platform used in the QuickSilver design today. We’ll have to see how that scales, but it’ll certainly be a compute monster. The real big deal will be the 5nm 2022 “Siryn” design –
if Ampere adopts the Neoverse-V1 CPU core from Arm, and I hope they will, then that would signify at minimum a +50% performance uplift, which is massive.
The Altra overall is an astounding achievement – the company has managed to meet, and maybe even surpass all expectations out of this first-generation design. With one fell swoop Ampere managed to position itself as a top competitor in the server CPU market. The Arm server dream is no longer a dream, it’s here today, and it’s real.
